TIMOTEUS ANGGAWAN KUSNO

Early life and background

Timoteus Anggawan Kusno was born in Indonesia in 1989 and began his artistic career in Yogyakarta in the late 2000s, participating in Biennale Jogja IX: Neo-Nation in 2007. He has since developed a practice that moves between Indonesia and Europe, living and working between Yogyakarta and Amsterdam, where he has held residencies and institutional collaborations.

Kusno’s training spans visual art, moving image, and research-driven practice, underpinning his interest in how power shapes historical narratives and collective memory. His long-running project the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies (founded 2013) adopts the form of a ‘fictional institution’ devoted to an imagined territory in the former Dutch East Indies, allowing the artist to test how fabricated archives can mirror the operations of official historiography.

Timoteus Anggawan Kusno artworks

Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s artworks merge installation, drawing, film, and institutional formats to explore how colonialism, military regimes, and their ‘shadows’ persist in bodies, landscapes, and archives. Through carefully constructed documents, scripted interviews, and cinematic tableaux, his works blur distinctions between fiction and documentary to reveal how editing, classification, and display produce what comes to be accepted as history.

Tanah Runcuk and fictional archives

Since 2013, Kusno has developed the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies, an ongoing project framed as a research institute devoted to a lost territory located at the meeting point of three tectonic plates and entangled with Dutch colonial expansion. Early exhibitions such as Memoir of Tanah Runcuk: A Note from the “Lost” Land at Kedai Kebun Forum in Yogyakarta examined how maps, testimonies, and museum-style displays can fabricate a coherent yet unstable narrative of place and memory.

Works related to Tanah Runcuk combine pseudo-ethnographic documents, models, and media fragments to question the authority of archives, echoing the bureaucratic language of colonial administration while exposing its erasures. By staging speculative histories as if they were institutional fact, Kusno reveals how power and ideology shape which stories are preserved and which are silenced.

Colonial legacies and museum collections

Kusno’s engagement with colonial history extends into major museum collaborations, most notably with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. There he produced Luka dan Bisa Kubawa Berlari (translated as Wounds and Venom I Carry as I Run), an installation that reconfigures colonial-era objects and images from the museum’s collection to evoke resistance leading up to the Indonesian revolution and to reflect on the ongoing ‘coloniality of power’.

Other works, including The Death of a Tiger and Other Empty Seats (2018), collected by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, extend this critical approach to display and spectatorship. Through staged absences, emptied chairs, and reoriented artefacts, Kusno’s installations trace how violence and trauma linger in institutional spaces and viewing habits.

Phantoms Trilogy and moving image

Kusno’s Phantoms Trilogy brings his interest in history-making into a cinematic form that combines archival footage, re-enactments, and AI-generated imagery. The three works—Reversal, Terra Incognita, and After Colossus—follow different protagonists and temporalities while addressing Indonesia’s transition from colonial rule to authoritarian militarism and beyond.

Reversal centres on a young man whose compulsive dance leads him through disused colonial sugar mills, connecting bodily gesture to inherited trauma and buried histories of labour and violence. After Colossus is set around the fall of Suharto and the discovery of secret files on “Project Rafflesia”, a covert operation that links state surveillance and political unrest, while Terra Incognita operates as an abstract index, focusing on erasure, mass mobilisation, and how official narratives overwrite lived memory.

Timoteus Anggawan Kusno Exhibitions

Select solo exhibitions

• Fever Dream, major solo exhibition exploring Indonesia’s colonial ghosts, venue including paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos developed over more than a decade
• Solo exhibition Memoir of Tanah Runcuk: A Note from the “Lost” Land, Kedai Kebun Forum, Yogyakarta
• Solo presentations related to Phantoms Trilogy with institutional partners and film organisations including Tate Modern and Han Nefkens Foundation

Select group exhibitions

• Power and Other Things: Indonesia & Art (1835–now), Europalia Arts Festival Indonesia, BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels
• 13th Gwangju Biennale, presenting Shades of the Unseen, commissioned installation on visibility and state violence
• Mindful Circulation, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Mumbai
• Exhibitions at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Bonn Museum of Modern Art; and other international museums and galleries

Select awards and accolades

• Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona Video Production Award, 2021
• VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Image, Production Fund, 2024
• Locarno Residency awardee, 2024
• Focus: Timoteus Anggawan Kusno at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2025, including a curated spotlight on his moving-image

Website and Instagram

Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s website can be found at https://www.takusno.com, which gathers information about his artworks, films, and projects. Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s Instagram can be found at https://www.instagram.com/takusno, where he shares images, exhibition updates, and studio-related content.

Timoteus Anggawan Kusno FAQs

Ocula | 2026